Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw:
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed;

But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing sed:
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.
Return, Alpheus; the dread voice is past,
That shrunk thy streams; return Sicilian Muse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells, and flowerets of a thousand hues.
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart-star sparely looks;
Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freak'd with jet,
The glowing violet,

The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears·
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureat herse where Lycid lies.
For, so to interpose a little ease,

Let our frail thoughts dally with a femal
surmise;
Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding
Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurla;
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou, perhaps, under the whelming tide,
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,

124. Serannel, thin, lean, meagre. 128. Nothing sed. Here Milton probahsiludes to those prelates and clergy o the established church who enjoyed fat salaries without performing any duties; whe “heared the sheep but did not feed them." Sed, for said.

180 and 131. In these lines our author anticipates the execution of Archbishop Laud, by a two-handed engine, that is, the axe; insinuating that his death would remove all grievances in religion, and complete the reformation of the church.-WARTON. The sense is, "But there will soon be an end of all these evils; the axe is at hand to take off the head of him who has been the great abettor of these corruptions of the gospel. This will be done by one stroke.”

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130

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Where the great vision of the guarded mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold;
Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth:
And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.

W Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,

Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor:
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,

165

And yet anon repairs his drooping head,

And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:

So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,

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Through the dear might of Him that walk'd the waves;
Where, other groves and other streams along,
With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,
And hears the unexpressive nuptial song,
In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love.
There entertain him all the saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet societies,
That sing, and, singing, in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.
Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more:
Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore,
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
To all that wander in that perilous flood.

Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills,
While the still morn went out with sandals gray;
He touch'd the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Dorick.lay:
And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the western bay:
At last he rose, and twitch'd his mantle blue:
o-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new

of Cornwall there is a stupendous pile of rock-work called the "giant's chair;" and not far from Land's End is another most romantic projection of rock, called St. Michael's Mount. There was a tradition that the "Vision" of St. Michael, seated on this crag, or St. Michael's chair, appeared to some hermits. The sense of this and the following lines connected with the preceding, is this:-"Let every flower be strewed on the hearse where Lycidas lies, so as to flatter ourselves for a moment with the notion that his corpse is present; and this (ah me!) while the geas are wafting it here and there, whether beyond the Hebrides, or near these shores of Cornwall, &c.

162. Namancos is marked in the early editions of Mercator's Atlas as in Galliia, on the north-west coast of Spain, | near Cape Finisterre. Bayona is the strong castle of the French, in the southwestern extremity of France, near the Pyrenees. In that same atlas this castle makes a very conspicuous figure.

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163. Here is an apostrophe to the angel Michael, seated on the guarded mount. "Oh angel, look no longer seaward to Namancos and Bayona's hold: rather turn your eyes to another object: look homeward or landward; look towards your own coast now, and view with pity the corpse of the shipwrecked, "eidas, floating thither."-T. WARTON.

165. Weep no more. Milton, in this sudden and beautiful transition from the gloomy and mournful strain into that of hope and comfort, imitates Spenser, in his Eleventh Ecloque, where, bewail. ing the death of some maiden of great blood in terms of the utmost grief and dejection, he breaks out all at once in the same manner.-THYER.

181. And wipe the tears. Isa. xxv. 8; Rev. vii. 17.

188. Stops, the holes of a flute.

189. This is a Dorick lay because Theocritus and Moschus had respectively written a Bucolic on the deaths of Dapli nis and Bion.

THE particular beauties of this charming pastoral are too striking to need much descanting upon; but what gives the greatest grace to the whole, is that natural and agreeable wildness and irregularity which run quite through it, than which nothing could be better suited to express the warm affection which Milton had for his friend, and the extreme grief he was in for the loss of him. Grief is eloquent, but not formal.—THYER.

Addison says, that he who desires to know whether he has a true tasto for history or not, should consider whether he is pleased with Livy's manner of telling a story; so, perhaps it may be said, that he who wishes to know whether he has a true taste for poetry or not, should consider whether he is highly delighted or not with the perusal of Milton's "Lycidas." If I might venture to place Milton's works, according to their degrees of poetic excellence, it should be perhaps in the following order: Paradise Lost, Comus, Samson Agonistes, Lycidas, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso. The last three are in such an exquisite strain, says Fenton, that though he had left no other monuments of his genius behind him, his name had been immortal.-Jos. WARTON.

In this piece there is perhaps more poetry than sorrow: but let us read it for its poetry. It is true, that passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of "rough Satyrs with cloven heel :" but poetry does this; and in the hands of Milton does it with a peculiar and irresistible charm. Subordinate poets exercise no invention, when they tell how a shepherd has lost his companion, and must feed his flocks alone, without any judge of his skill in piping: but Milton dignifies and adorns these common artificial incidents with unexpected touches of picturesque beauty, with the graces of sentiment, and with the novelties of original genius. It is objected "here is no art, for there is nothing new." To say nothing that there may be art without novelty, as well as novelty without art, I must reply that this objection will vanish, if we consider the imagery which Milton has raised from local circumstances. Not to repeat the use he has made of the mountains of Wales, the Isle of Man, and the river Dee, near which Lycidas was shipwrecked; let us recollect the introduction of the romantic superstition of St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall, which overlooks the Irish Sea, the fatal scene of his friend's disaster.

But the poetry is not always unconnected with passion. The poet lavishly describes an ancient sepulchral rite, but it is made preparatory to a stroke of tenderness: he calls for a variety of flowers to decorate his friend's hearse, supposing that his body was present, and forgetting for a while that it was floating far off in the ocean. If he was drowned, it was some consolation that he was to receive the decencies of burial. This is a pleasing deception: it is natural and pathetic. But the real catastrophe recurs; and this circumstance again opens a new vein of imagination.

Dr. Johnson censures Milton for his allegorical mode of telling that he and Lycidas studied together, under the fictitious images of rural employments, in which, he says, there can be no tenderness; and prefers Cowley's lamentation of the loss of Harvey, the companion of his labours, and the partner of his discoveries. I know not, if in this similarity of subject Cowley has more tenderness; I am sure he has less poetry: I will allow that he has more wit, and more smart similes. The sense of our author's allegory on this occasion is obvious, and is just as intelligible as if he had used plain terms. It is a fiction, that, when Lycidas died, the woods and caves were deserted, and overgrown with wild thyme and luxuriant vines, and that all their echoes mourned; and that the green copse

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no longer waved their joyous leaves to his soft strains: but we cannot here be at a loss for a meaning; a meaning, which is as clearly perceived as it is elegantly represented.-T. WARTON.

The rhymes and numbers, which Dr. Johnson condemns, appear to me as eminent proofs of the poet's judgment; exhibiting, in their varied and arbitrary disposition, an ease and gracefulness, which infinitely exceed the formal couplets or alternate rhymes of modern Elegy. Lamenting also the prejudice which has pronounced "Lycidas" to be vulgar and disgusting, I shall never cease to consider this monody as the sweet effusion of a most poetic and tender mind; entitled, as well by its beautiful melody, as by the frequent grandeur of its sentiments and language, to the utmost enthusiasm of admiration.-TODD.

Whatever stern grandeur Milton's two epics and his drama, written in his latter days, exhibit; by whatever divine invention they are created; "Lycidas" and "Comus" have a fluency, a sweetness, a melody, a youthful freshness, a dewy brightness of description, which those gigantic poems have not. It is true that "Lycidas" has no deep grief; its clouds of sorrow are everywhere pierced by the golden rays of a splendid and joyous imagination: the ingredients are all poetical, even to single words; the epithets are all picturesque and fresh; and the whole are combined into a splendid tissue, as new in their position as they are radiant in their union. The unexpected transitions from one to the other at once surprise and delight: they are like the heavens of an autumnal evening, when they are lighted up by electric flames. The contrasts of sorrow, and hope, and glory, keep us in a state of mingled excitement to the end: the imagery never flags: though it blazes with the most beautiful forms of inanimate nature, and all sorts of pastoral pictures; yet the whole are by some spell or other made intellectual and spiritual: they do not play merely upon the mirror of the fancy.

That prime charm of poetry, the rapidity and the novelty, yet the natural association of beautiful ideas, is preeminently exhibited in "Lycidas," where the sudden transitions to contrasted images and sentiments keep the mind in a state of delightful ferment;

And o'er the cheek of sorrow throw

A melancholy grace.

It strikes me, that there is no poem of Milton, in which the pastoral and rural imagery is so breathing, so brilliant, and so new, as in this: the tone which has most similtude to it, is that of some descriptive passages of Shakspeare, whose simple brightness and modulation of words seem always to have dwelt on Milton's memory and ear.

But though strength was Milton's characteristic, there are many passages, many turns of thought and expression, in this poem, which are not wanting in tenderness, in pathetic recollections, and tearful sighs; in that sort of grief which belongs to true poetry: in grief neither factitious nor gloomy, but genuine, though hopeful; and mingled with rays of light, though melancholy. But I must forbear to say more on this exquisite and inimitable Elegy, lest those remarks should run to an extent disproportioned to its length.-SIR EGERTON BRYDGes.

REMARKS

ON

L'ALLEGRO AND IL PENSEROSO.

WHEN Milton's juvenile poems were revived into notice about the middle of the last century, these two short lyrics became, I think, the most popular. They are very beautiful, but in my opinion far from the best of the poet's youthful productions: they have far less invention than "Comus" or "Lycidas," and surely invention is the primary essential; they have more of fancy than invention, as those two words are in modern use distinguished from each other. Besides, it is clear that they were suggested by the poem prefixed to "Burton's Anatomie of Melancholy," and a song in the "Nice Valour" of Beaumont and Fletcher.

There is here no fable, which is absolutely necessary for prime poetry. The rural descriptions are fresh, forcible, picturesque, and most happily selected; but still many of them seem to me much less original than those of "Lycidas" and "Comus;" and though there is a certain degree of contemplative sentiment in them all, it is not of so passionate or sublime a kind as in those other exquisite pieces, in which there is more of moral instruction and mingled intellect, and, in short, vastly more of spirituality. The scenery of nature, animate and inanimate, derives its most intense interest from its connection with our moral feelings and duties, and our ideal visions. If I am not mistaken, Gray thought this when he spoke of merely descriptive poems. Gray's own stanza, in his "Fragment on Vicissitude," beginning

Yesterday the sullen year

Saw the snowy whirlwind fly,

perhaps the finest stanza in his poems, is a most striking example of this sublime combination.

I say, that these two admired lyrics of Milton have less of this combination than I could wish. They were written in the buoyancy and joyousness of youth, though the joyousness of the latter is pensive. All was yet hope with the poet; none of the evils of life had yet come upon him. It was the joy of mental display and visionary glory, of a mind proudly displaying its own richness, and throwing from its treasures beams of light on all external objects; but it was the rapidity of a ferment too much in motion, to allow it to wait long enough on particular topics: therefore there was in these two productions less intensity than in most of the author's other poetry: he is here generally content to describe the surface of what he notices. His learned allusions abound, though not so much perhaps as in most of his other writings; these, however, are not the proofs of his genius, but only of his memory and industry.

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